Project Code Rush

The year is early 1998, at the height of dot-com era, and a small team of Netscape code writers frantically works to reconstruct the company's Internet browser. In doing so they will rewrite the rules of software development by giving away the recipe for its browser in exchange for integrating improvements created by outside unpaid developers. The fate of the entire company may well rest on their shoulders. Broadcast on PBS, the film capture the human and technological dramas that unfold in the collision between science, engineering, code, and commerce.

Under the creative commons license .3, the producers of Code Rush, which aired in 2000, are making available all the original footage shot for the film, over 100 hours, along with searchable transcripts. Over the next few weeks we will upload batches of footage to the web, with our encouragement to other filmmakers and storytellers to use this material in their own sharable projects. We include the first six hours of footage, where Netscape engineers come together to plot their release of the code.

Project Code Rush is an open source video project aimed at creating a video record of a critical piece of internet history. This recod will include the film, its 105 hours of footage, and nearly 3,000 pages of audio transcripts. The footage will be organized into nodes with the following elements: Keywords, list of people in footage, text transcript of the video, vimeo video, download links for the full footage in Prosec442 and Mp4.

Our hope is that other film makers, tech enthusiasts, and history buffs will help us piece together a video/web a living document of Netscape at its peak, and its birthing of Mozilla.org.